A polemic against the Real in favor of the new and the strange. Isidore Ducasse, or The Count of Lautremont, fits neatly into a genealogy that includes Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Batailles, and Burroughs, but he carves out a space for himself that is entirely new, no matter what that means.

Here we have a cabinet of grotesqueries, each “verse” in these cantos consists of foul imagery of atrocities performed by and around Maldoror, the closest thing that we get to a protagonist, antagonist, or narrator. The book shifts constantly from first to third person, like a camera that is interested in a specific POV until the macabre action of a scene demands that we get a closeup. Maybe the book’s visual nature is what drew Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and the Surrealists to it. They resurrected the book almost fifty years after its release, making it an extremely unlikely lost artifact to guide the movement. But the right book has a way of reentering the collective consciousness at the exact time it’s needed. Perhaps the shadow of the World Wars was enough sacrificial violence to summon this vile book back into the European zeitgeist.

And once a reader can get past the foul imagery there is a lot to love here. There is an intense metamorphosis and and emphasis on the changeable nature of mankind and all life. Animals shift into other animals, humans are composed of animals. There is little concern for the constant or immovable. All of this is overseen by a mad delusional God, often drunk in a cannibal revelry where we see him surveying his weird creation. Lautremont constantly seeks this God’s humiliation and abasement. But how like Lautremont He is as a curator of horrors. Is the polemic antitheist nature of this book self loathing, literary critique of Realist contemporaries, or perhaps something else? Something deeper that involves author as character and narrator and God himself.

Gothic literature often has an obsession with death and the inanimate. This is a strange perversion of that schema. It’s an obsession with putrid, wriggling, violent life. All must be personified and it must be defined by a movement that mimics the human but seeks to represent some underlying truth beneath these behaviors as we know them. Mandatory supplemental material is Dali’s own wriggling illustrations of the book.

Maldoror (Les chants de Maldoror)

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